The morning after the big "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" sale, I went to see Christine Mayall, owner of Bookshop Benicia. I had read the article by John Moses in the Benicia Herald about the hundred people who had lined up at midnight to buy Rowling’s latest, and I wanted to learn more.

I wanted to know, I told Christine, if she had sold Potter through the night and into the morning? And I especially wanted to know whether young lives would be changed forever?

Christine stood next to box piled on box of Potters and looked at me as though too much coffee had addled my brain, saying that the midnight sale had lasted less than half an hour.

But—but—I persevered—protesting that column closure demanded more grandiose claims—wasn’t is possible that since children were reading the Potter series over and over again and since they were now about to read such a large book—734 pages, though the font is large—wasn’t it possible that when these children were grown, they would be completely different from previous generations?

Christine smiled indulgently and said that she had observed an increase in the number of children reading other books.

Ah ha! I said, quickly grasping the truth I sought: As a result of Potter, children will read more and their lives will be different. (I parenthetically explained to Christine that for the purposes of my column, plausibility is sometimes more compelling than reality.)

Though satisfied that the-darkest-hour-just-before-dawn had passed, I must confess two failures. (There are many more to which I could admit, but only two seem relevant.)

I have only begun reading the first Potter. Actually, I have only read the first few pages of the first Potter, and this I did while falling asleep. My wife is on the current—the massive fourth—Potter, so as I dozed off, I asked her to more or less fill me in on what has happened so far.

Secondly, as a child, I did not read books. I collected. I examined. Anything I came across that moved I put in a bottle of carbon-tetrachloride and mounted, a needle piercing it, in one of my grandfather’s discarded cigar boxes. (Perhaps only Potter could compete with the sight and smell, when the lid is raised, of dead-bug treasure.)

Anything that was already dead, like rocks, shells and feathers, I put in boxes and cataloged or glued to cards. And when I wasn’t examining and collecting the living and dead, I was reading Classic Comic Books, which were illustrated, very condensed versions of books that I should have been reading in their complete form.

But I was afraid of all those pages without pictures.

There, the truth is out: I’m envious of these millions of children who are living with Dumbledore, Snape, and Voldemort (a.k.a. you-know-who). And if they haven’t already, they’ll soon be going on to C.S. Lewis’s "The Chronicles of Narnia", T.H. White’s "The Once and Future King", and William Saroyan’s "The Human Comedy", books that my wife and I read to our sons, but not books that I read when I was young.

When I was a child, no one lined up at midnight to buy books, though we did go crazy for hula-hoops and yo-yos, which aren’t exactly the intellectual equivalents of multi-character, multi-plot Potters.

I finally became an avid reader, unafraid of pictureless books, after reading Dostoyevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" in high school. As an unsure adolescent, I was drawn to the tormented Roskolnikov much as young readers today are probably drawn to the orphaned Harry Potter, condemned to an unhappy home life, who finds himself when he learns he is a wizard and goes off to the Hogwarts’ School of Wizardry.

A few critics have given the current Potter marginal reviews, claiming it’s too long and discursive. William Safire, the curmudgeonly columnist for the NY Times, recently complained that an adult who reads Potter should read more serious books. Worst of all, some towns have banned the books because they purportedly teach witchcraft.

Pooh on these insufferable fellows.

We know that young people will read and reread this fourth Potter because they’ll discover the euphoria of knowing they are not alone with their feelings. Adults will read it because they want to share in the experience or remember it or catch up on an experience they never had. And as for witchcraft, aren’t all children wizards when they find themselves?